Bismart, Microsoft, Barcelona City Council and the City Protocol Society are the promoters of this event.
Barcelona has been the city chosen these days to hold the first 'Smart City Meeting' in Europe and has welcome representatives and officials from cities like Warsaw, Dublin, The Hague, Dordrecht, Eindhoven and representatives of the province of Gelderland (Netherlands).
The main objective of 'Barcelona Smart City Meeting' is to inspire city leaders, technological professionals, urban planners and architects to develop the cities of the future, in order to make them more efficient, resilient and sustainable.
Lluis Sanz, Director of Corporate Information in the City of Barcelona and Chair of DICI (Data Interoperability and City Indicators) TAFT in the City Protocol Society, presented the objectives of this worldwide organization of trusted cities: "The City Protocol Society aims to create the 'Internet of cities' to share solutions and become a platform with solutions across the silos within and between cities in order to build a more sustainable future".
Bismart presented a platform of real solutions for this transformation process to promote more intelligent and sustainable cities, coming from the data. Albert Isern, CEO of Bismart said: "Bismart’s Big Data solutions transform the chaos of data that is generated around cities into clockwork. We help governments to make the best decisions, to be more efficient, improve the quality of life and enhance the economic development of cities."
For two days, attendees of the meeting were able to experience Smart City projects in the city of Barcelona such as Open Data, Open Government Platform sensors, smart lighting, smart water, electric bicycles, new network of zero carbon emission buses, among others.
Smart City Experience
The day began on Monday with a special visit to the Sagrada Família, which is one of the main attractions in Barcelona. It also works and helps the city in managing the large number of visitors and their impact on the neighborhood.
During the second day, key people from smart city managing positions led the working session. Albert Isern, CEO of Bismart, opened the conference and introduced the keynote speakers: Josep Ramon Ferrer, Deputy CIO and Smart City Director of Barcelona City Council, Maria Galindo, Barcelona Smart City Business Development, Enrique Martin, Technological Institute of Barcelona and José Antonio Ondiviela, Western Europe Manager of Microsoft, who closed the round of presentations.
The evening continued with a Smart City tour around the city, where the urban transformation and the deployment of IT infrastructure is taking place in Barcelona, was shown.
Barcelona, the smartest city in the world
The city of Barcelona has become the smartest city in the world ahead of New York, London and Nice, winning the award 'Smart Global City 2015', assessed by Juniper Research.
After collecting and analyzing the intelligent capabilities of traffic and street lighting, along with aspects such as technological capacity and social cohesion, it was found that the leading city is Barcelona. Thus it becomes an interesting model of success that other cities can learn from, reinforced by its strong environmentally sustainable initiatives.
Other cities like New York and London, still require a greater emphasis on the implementation of environmentally positive projects, despite excellence in areas such as technological ability and willingness to collaborate with citizens through open data.
